Individual phenotypes are cuts through genotype, shaped by developmental environments. But individuals do not exist in isolation. Populations, communities, and ecological networks form fields of structured potential — collective landscapes within which individuation unfolds.
Understanding evolution at this scale reveals how potential itself is organised, constrained, and made available for future actualisations.
Collective Potential: Beyond the Individual
While an organism is an individuated instance, a population is a meta-system of potential:
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It embodies the range of phenotypes that could be actualised.
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Interactions between individuals modulate which potentials are stabilised or suppressed.
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Environmental pressures are mediated not only at the level of single organisms but across the network of interactions.
In this sense, the population does not merely contain individuals; it structures the field of possible individuations, influencing evolution at every scale.
Interplay Between Individuals and the Field of Potential
Individual and collective potentials are dynamically entangled:
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Constraint Feedback: Successful individual trajectories stabilise certain potential pathways, narrowing or guiding future actualisations.
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Emergent Opportunities: Novel interactions can open previously inaccessible trajectories, creating evolutionary innovation.
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Relational Structuring: Environmental and social interactions shape the topology of potential, so that the field itself evolves alongside its instances.
This demonstrates that evolution operates both through the actualisations of individuals and through the reconfiguration of collective potential.
Illustrative Examples
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Bacterial Colonies: Individual cells’ growth and metabolite production reshape the colony environment, influencing the next generation of actualisations.
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Social Animals: Hierarchies, alliances, and cooperative strategies shape reproductive success and constrain which behavioural phenotypes are realised.
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Epigenetic Effects: Collective exposure to stressors or nutrients can stabilise developmental trajectories across multiple generations.
Each example shows how individual actualisations and collective structures co-define what is possible, highlighting the relational nature of evolution.
Transition to Semiotic Systems
This population-level perspective primes us for the next evolutionary leap: semiotic systems.
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Where populations organise potential relationally, symbolic systems make structured potential internally accessible as phenomenon.
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Meaning systems do not merely actualise potential; they construe it, evaluate it, and modify it reflexively.
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Semiotic systems introduce internal normativity, error, and cross-stratal feedback, deepening the same relational logic we have seen in biological evolution.
Series 2 will explore how this deepening transforms the dynamics of individuation, evolution, and the architecture of possibility itself.
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